Japanese woman lives in a closet for a year, the owner doesn’t notice

You know that feeling of being watched that everyone gets now and then?

Most of the time it really is just a bad feeling, but sometimes your instinct is right. That’s what happened to a Japanese man, who found a nasty surprise in his closet.

Food mysteriously disappearing

In Kasuya, a small town in Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan, in 2008 a 57-year-old man who lived alone began to notice that small amounts of food were mysteriously disappearing from his fridge.

At first he thought he was mistaken and was miscounting his supplies, but when he started writing down every day how much food was left in the fridge, he realized something was wrong. Food really was missing. So he thought he was the victim of a petty thief and installed a camera in the house linked to his mobile phone to watch the apartment while he was out.

Shortly afterwards, while he was out, he saw someone moving around his kitchen.

He immediately called the police, who went to check. Officers found the house locked, with no signs of a break-in at the door or windows. They went in with the owner and began searching the house, checking everywhere a person could possibly hide.

The woman in the closet

When they opened the closet in a Japanese-style room, which the man rarely used and where he kept his futons, there was the surprise:

on the top shelf, a space just big enough for a person to squeeze into, a woman was curled up nervously on her side.

She was Tatsuko Horikawa, a 58-year-old homeless woman, who told police she had nowhere to live. She had entered the house about a year earlier, taking advantage of a day when the owner had gone out without locking the door.

Horikawa had moved a mattress onto the shelf and lived there, though not all the time, eating what she found in the fridge, using the bathroom and taking showers when the man was out. Police spokesman Hiroki Itakura described her as “neat and clean”.

She doesn’t seem to have ever stolen money or valuables: she simply needed a place to live, even just a closet shelf.

The woman was nevertheless arrested for trespassing. Police also suspected she had lived the same way in other houses in the area, moving from closet to closet.

Today this phenomenon even has a name, phrogging: secretly living in someone else’s home without their knowledge.

This story gave me the chills and from now on I’ll check every closet door and under the bed before going to sleep!

Sources

• NBC News – Homeless woman lived in man’s closet for year
• Dawn – Woman lived in man’s closet undetected for a year
• Medindia – Japanese Homeless Woman Who Lived in the Closet of a Stranger’s House for a Year Arrested
• China Daily – Japanese man finds woman living in his closet