Apartment Manager Adventures

One day, while my wife and I were on our way out the door to go shopping, I heard a faint high pitch noise coming from inside the building. I didn’t think much of the noise at the time, but after a few hours of shopping, I noticed the noise was still there when we returned home. 

After unpacking our groceries, I walked through the building to investigate the noise. After a few brief minutes, I discovered which apartment the noise was coming from. Our apartment is on the first floor, and the one making the noise was all the way up on the third floor. I listened at the door and could hear the high pitch noise ringing loud. I could also hear a strange popping noise.

I knocked on the door… - No answer. I knocked louder… -Again, no answer. I then pounded the door so hard it felt like I was going to knock it off its hinges. I heard someone stirring inside. Now I’ve seen a lot of weird and unexpected things being an apartment manager, but I could not have guessed what I was about to see.

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The tenant opened his door. Immediately smoke started pouring out of his door into the hallway. The lights were all off except for the dim light above his oven. The tenant looked at me blankly. I quickly noticed that his forehead had dried blood and a gash with quite a bit of swelling around it.

As soon as the door opened, I could tell that the high pitch noise was his smoke detector. I asked him if everything was okay and he said “Yeah.. everything is fine” I then asked why his apartment was full of smoke. He said “Oh, uh… I’m just … uhmm… cooking!” (He really had to think hard as to why there might be smoke in his apartment.) I asked him if I could come in for a few minutes to help get his smoke detector quiet.

He let me in and I could see the source of the popping noise. He had a shallow frying skillet on the stovetop and about four hamburgers sputtering in grease and smoking like crazy. They were mostly dried out, curling up, and were quite disgusting looking. Anyway, I turned off the burner and took the skillet off the hot burner. I disconnected the smoke detector and opened all the windows to help the apartment air out. While I was in the process of doing all this, the tenant just went and laid down in his bed. I found that to be quite odd. He was acting strange and didn’t seem to be very aware of what was going on.

I got the smoke cleared from the apartment and then reconnected the smoke detector. I went and woke up the tenant to check on him and ask him about the injury to his head. I was basically worried that he might have a concussion or something. I was persistently trying to get him to let me take him to the doctor or to call the paramedics but he was strongly against the idea and said he just wanted to be left alone so he could sleep. (It was about 8:30 PM)

While talking to him, I did notice that there was a prescription bottle of Ambien (A Prescription drug used to treat insomnia) sitting on his nightstand. I respected his desire to be left alone and told him I would show myself out and lock his apartment.


The next day, I knocked on his door just to check on him (I was still worried about his head injury) I asked him if he remembered talking to me the night before, he said he could vaguely remember a little but not much. He was back to his old self, completely alert and aware of what he was saying and what was being said.

I told him what had happened and he was really surprised. He said that he had taken some Ambien to help him sleep and didn’t remember much of anything until this morning. He said he thought he could remember hitting his head in his bathroom, but couldn’t remember trying to cook the hamburgers or much of my visit to his apartment either. He was pretty embarrassed about the whole thing.

I was curious about this so I actually went to the official website for the drug Ambien and on this page: http://www.ambiencr.com/ it actually has the following warning: “Sleepwalking, and eating or driving while not fully awake, with amnesia for the event, have been reported” That’s crazy! Well, he took care of at least two of those side effects! I can just see him driving down the road asleep while eating his burnt hamburger!

Have any of you ever encountered someone that was sleepwalking (Either the traditional kind or the drug induced variety) Let us know about it in the comments section below!


Image of man sleepwalking from 101funpages.com

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Funny Stories, Strange Stories, Weird Stuff, Written by Enforcer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.