I’m starting to suspect my neighbors are a cult

Art
4 min readJan 24, 2021

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Hey! If you’re reading this, well, then I’m probably alive, I’m not really in any danger to be honest, but still. You want to hear about a cult don’t you?

Anyways, I like to call myself a “Private Detective” because I love solving mysteries, my parents personally call me “Unemployed” and “Fuckin’ Loser” and “Please find a real job” and I just want them to know I’m trying my best and the job market is real competitive right now.

I’m living in this real rundown apartment complex, sometimes the water doesn’t work, sometimes there’s no power for more than 2 days, and other times a family of rats takes over one of the apartments and all of us neighbors need to band together to drive them out because the exterminator ghosts our calls, mostly because one of the rats mutated to be much bigger than normal so he attacks dogs, cats and rarely humans if he thinks he can beat them. (He did end up beating one once, it was an ugly event, our landlord Ray said children are not allowed in the building without supervision after that, I lovingly nicknamed the mutant rat with the name Leg after that).

But still, I would rather live here than with my parents, am I right, guys? Anyways, I live in the middle of the third floor in this 3 story building, with around 4 apartments per floor, and an elderly couple lives next to me, Mary and John, they’re pretty old, but still seem pretty active, since they’re hosting meetups almost every night, and it always feels like every single person in this building attends them, minus me of course, I’m not invited, which is the first suspicious part, who wouldn’t invite me to a nice neighbor meetup? But it’s not like they completely ignore my existence either.

Whenever I do leave my apartment (mostly for job interviews or to go to that nice Palmart, they have great slushies) it always feels like I’m being watched, I can’t quite place a finger on it, but, if I turn around fast enough while walking, I’ll catch some of my neighbors doors closing as fast as they can, as if there was a small space there that someone could peek through.

Besides that, and some minor complaints, like the incredibly loud chanting in unknown language that can be heard through the thin walls at 3:30 AM (seriously, its woken me up so much my internal sleeping clock has adjusted for it, I wake up at that time anyways even if there wasn’t a meeting that day), or that time I caught one of my neighbors carrying a bloody goat head to the night meeting, or the time one of my neighbors, Carl, covered in head to toe in what I suspect is blood, attacked me in a deranged frenzy and I had to beat him back with my trust bat, and then absolutely nobody spoke about that incident and I never saw Carl again.

So, you’re probably thinking “Wow, this is pretty fucked up”, I’m also thinking that, and googling “Can I break into my neighbor’s house to investigate my suspicions of them being a cult” only yielded a website that promises to deliver me a reliable lawyer I’m starting to think my only option is telling my landlord Ray. (I checked the website and I couldn’t really afford any of the lawyers besides one guy who was named “Bob” without any last name, he also didn’t have any contact info besides an address, and I’m pretty sure the address leads to nowhere in the forest).

About Ray, my Landlord, honestly, besides the fact that he’s a landlord, he’s a pretty sweet old man, he lets me skip on paying my rent once a while since he knows I’m struggling, bakes me cookies once in a while, listens to my problems, and has also shot Leg 4 times when it looked like that rat was about to beat the Rat Extermination party that one time, though I’m really not sure how Leg survived that.

So I went and told him, “Wow, this is pretty fucked up” was his reaction, I agreed.

He said he would confront the cultists by himself the next night meeting, and that I would no longer need to worry about them after that, he also paid me $100 for “being such a good detective”.

So take that, Mom and Dad, I DO have a real job, and it’s only the start for me.

Night came, and Ray did end up confronting everyone at the meeting, it started out pretty calmly, then some yelling, some crying, then suddenly I heard a lot of movement and things crashing and breaking after Ray told them they all “needed to find a new place”, I heard Ray screaming a lot after that. Then silence, then the chanting came back, right at 3:30 AM.

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