The Mystery of Apartment 3B

I Thought My Neighbor Was Just Strange… Until I Discovered What He Was Doing At Night About a year ago, I moved into a small apartment building in a quiet neighborhood. It wasn’t anything special. Just a normal four-story building with maybe twenty apartments in total. The kind of place where people mostly keep to themselves. I had just started a new job, and I wanted somewhere calm. Somewhere predictable. Somewhere I could come home after work and just relax. At first, everything about the place felt exactly like that. Quiet. Almost too quiet. Most of the neighbors were older. The kind of people who water plants on their balconies and say hello politely in the hallway. The building manager, an older man named Carl, told me something the day I signed the lease. He said the building had almost no problems. No parties. No loud music. No police visits. Everyone just minded their own business. And for the first week… that seemed completely true. Until I started noticing my neighbor. He lived in the apartment right next to mine. And the strange thing was… I almost never saw him during the day. The first time I noticed him was late at night. It was around two in the morning, and I had gotten up to grab some water from the kitchen. That’s when I heard footsteps in the hallway. Slow… careful footsteps. I remember thinking it was strange because the building was usually silent at that hour. Curiosity got the better of me, so I quietly looked through the peephole on my door. And that’s when I saw him. My neighbor. He was walking down the hallway carrying a large black duffel bag. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. People work night shifts. Maybe he was heading to work. Maybe he was coming home from somewhere. But something about the way he walked felt… nervous. He kept looking over his shoulder. Almost like he was worried someone might be watching him. Then he disappeared down the stairwell. And the hallway went quiet again. I forgot about it after that. At least for a few days. But then I started noticing something strange. It kept happening. Every single night. Around the same time. Two in the morning. Sometimes two-thirty. I would hear the door next to mine open. Footsteps in the hallway. And when I looked through the peephole… there he was again. Always carrying that same black bag. Always leaving the building in the middle of the night. The weirdest part? When he came back… the bag was always gone. At first I tried to ignore it. It wasn’t my business. People have their own lives. But after a couple weeks… things started getting stranger. I began hearing noises through the wall between our apartments. Not loud noises. But strange ones. Dragging sounds. Heavy thumps. Like someone moving furniture around. The first time I heard it, it was almost midnight. I figured maybe he was just rearranging things. But the noise kept happening. Night after night. Always late. Always when the rest of the building was asleep. And sometimes… I thought I heard voices. Which didn’t make sense. Because according to the building manager, that apartment was rented to just one person. One night I finally decided to ask Carl about it. I caught him in the lobby while he was checking the mailboxes. I asked him if he knew the guy who lived next door to me. Carl looked confused for a second. Then he said, “You mean the guy in 3B?” I nodded. Carl shrugged. “Quiet guy,” he said. “Been here about six months.” That was it. That was all he knew. And for a while… that answer satisfied me. Until the night everything changed. It was around two-thirty in the morning. I had just fallen asleep when a loud crash woke me up. Not a small noise. A huge noise. Like something heavy had fallen over. And it came from the apartment next door. I sat up in bed, listening. For a moment everything was silent. Then I heard something else. A voice. Muffled. Like someone shouting. But I couldn’t make out the words. Then… silence. Complete silence. The kind of silence that feels wrong. I sat there for a few minutes trying to convince myself it was nothing. Maybe he dropped something. Maybe the TV was loud. But the feeling in my stomach told me something wasn’t right. So I got up. Walked to the door. And stepped into the hallway. The lights were dim like usual. Everything looked normal. But when I stood in front of his door… something strange happened. The door slowly moved. Just a little. Like it hadn’t been fully closed. It opened maybe an inch. And through that small gap… I could see inside. At first I only saw light. Bright white light. Much brighter than a normal apartment light. So I pushed the door open slightly more. Just enough to look inside. And what I saw made my stomach drop. The apartment didn’t look like a normal living space. There were no couches. No dining table. No decorations. Instead the room was filled with equipment. Cameras. Tripods. Lighting rigs. Microphones. It looked like some kind of filming studio. But that wasn’t the part that scared