Secret Squatter

"He had been living inside of Casita amongst the Madrigal family for an entire decade, and no one had ever discovered his presence?!"

— Mirabel, The Mouse in the Walls, "Chapter 11: Fabric Colored Green"

Characters in a story live in a Big Fancy House. But something strange is going on. Maybe their food is disappearing, or they keep hearing strange noises in the middle of the night. Could they be haunted?

Not exactly. Someone is living inside their house in an attic, basement or crawl space (or maybe even Inside a Wall, which is the supertrope), unknown to the people who are actually supposed to live there. The slang for doing this is called "phrogging." They may live in a basement, but Bunker Woman refers to people who are generally imprisoned underground, and Basement-Dweller refers to people who live in squalid conditions to reflect their apparent lack of social standing. If it's well-occupied enough, this trope can overlap with Non-Residential Residence if someone is doing this in a place of business instead of a house.

Very closely connected to Madwoman in the Attic, and often even a subtrope of it. However, the presence of the secret squatter isn't known to any of the characters, which may be a source of Paranoia Fuel. If they don't share the house but simply live in it while the homeowners are away, that's House Squatting.

This may be one explanation for why The Calls Are Coming from Inside the House. Closely related to Crazy Homeless People, where they're stealing the "home" from the house's owners. They may be a Stalker with a Crush or Stalker without a Crush if they're actually aiming for the homeowners, but they are just as likely to be a random, possibly mentally ill stranger. If they're non-human, this may be part of a Mouse World or Wainscot Society.

While this has apparently happened in real life, it also has many of the hallmarks of a modern Urban Legend, due to showing up in some more dubious or less trustworthy sources. The secret squatter is also a semi-regular guest in other Urban Legends.

This is a spoiler trope, referring as it does to a major Plot Twist. As a result, please expect unmarked spoilers everywhere.

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Examples from inside the house:

Comic Strips

• In Scary Gary, there is a mystery person living in the shadows under the stairs to Gary’s basement who is only visible to the audience By the Lights of Their Eyes as they watch people go up and down the stairs. The only one in the house who has seen them so far is Leopold’s coffee mug, although Gary eventually does get a feeling someone might be down there, and tries to catch a quick glimpse of them with a flashlight. Fortunately for the squatter, they just barely manage to duck out of the spot in time to remain hidden.

Film — Animated

• Encanto: Bruno became self-exiled after his prophecies turned sour. As it turns out, however, he couldn't bring himself to leave his family, so he turned into this and lived inside the walls and frame of the house by himself for years.

Film — Live-Action

• Aftermath (2021): Otto, Erin's secret former lover, has been living in the house even long after she stopped living in it. When Kevin and Natalie move in, Otto sets his sights on Natalie as his new lover, intending to kill Kevin so he doesn't get in the way.
• Bad Ronald: After Ronald's mother dies, he still doesn't leave the closed-off room where he has been locked up for years, even when another family moves in, poking around in the sisters' room, and eventually kidnapping Babs. Babs survives in the film, but both she and her sister, Althea, are murdered by Ronald in the book.
• Barbarian: Frank, the Mother, and perhaps the women he kidnapped and raped have been living in AJ's house, unbeknownst to him or (at least most of) the people who rented it out. A different example since it was Frank's house first.
• Black Christmas (1974): Billy has been hiding in the sorority house for an unknown period of time (implied to be a few weeks, since the women said the calls started then), making obscene calls and then escalating to murdering them (and hiding some of his victims' bodies in the attic).
• Cruz Diablo: Nostromus, who lives in the walls of the palace and spies from behind paintings on people.
• Hereditary: Although it's never explicitly confirmed, it's heavily implied that several cult members have been hiding in the Grahams' house for a long period of time, judging by the messages written on the walls, the unexplained noises at night, and how quickly they turn up to complete the ritual.
• Hider In The House is about a newly-released psychiatric patient who hides in a crawl space to spy on the family inside, killing their dog, and going as far as to murder several people.
• Housebound: Kylie's mother's house used to be a halfway house where a girl was once murdered. After a series of unexplained events, the protagonists believe the house is either haunted by the girl's ghost or secretly inhabited by her very alive killer. It's neither. The man in the walls, Eugene, is a severe recluse hiding from his abusive father, and he's been trying to help Kylie find the real killer. Unusually for this trope, once Eugene helps save the family, they are happy to have him continue living in the walls.
• The Invisible Man (2020): Cecilia moves into James's house following Adrian's apparent "death". It's implied, judging by the keys, knife, and phone, that James's attic may be Adrian's lair, where he waits around when not trying to terrorize Cecilia. However, it may also just be that Adrian left the stuff there to strike even more fear into her.
• I See You: Mysterious events keep occurring in the Harpers' spacious home as the father, Greg, is investigating a series of child murders. It turns out that they have been targeted by a pair of "phroggers", one of whom is actually the Serial Killer Greg's surviving victim and is determined to torture his family in revenge.
• Kiss the Girls: The opening monologue in the film, and the first killer narration in the Alex Cross novel, reveals that "Casanova" lived in his first obsession, Coty's, house for an entire month, becoming sexually obsessed with her, her sister, and her mother, before raping and killing them all.
• An unusual example in Malignant. The kidnapped woman is revealed to have been in Madison's attic the entire time, as revealed when she falls through the floor into Madison's house proper. Neither she nor Madison knew she was there, because Gabriel, Madison's parasitic twin, had taken her there.
• In A Man with a Maid, a Victorian aristocrat buys a former madhouse and converts it into a "love nest". Unknown to him, Jack the Ripper lives in secret passages lining the building.
• The Pact: Annie is being haunted by a ghost — but the ghost is trying to warn her that there's actually a flesh-and-blood Serial Killer, her crazy uncle, hiding in her basement.
• In Parasite (2019), Moon-gwang's husband Geun-sae has been secretly living in the hidden basement bunker for four years, hiding from loan sharks. At the end of the film, Ki-taek is now living there, as he hides from the police who want him for murdering Mr. Park.
• Relative Fear: Clive, the "therapist" who works with the Switched at Birth autistic boy Adam, is actually Adam's biological father, the Serial Killer Gary Madison. He secretly lives in the Pratmans' attic, killing everyone who bothers Adam, leading Linda to think Adam is a murderer.

Literature

• In Edo Gawaranpo's short story "The Human Chair", and the manga adaptation of it by Junji Ito, a woman discovers that a man has been living, unseen, inside her favorite chair for months on end.
• Played with in Secrets. After Treasure is faced with the possibility of being sent back to her abusive stepfather Terry and her mother, she hides in India's attic. Although India helps her, neither of India's parents nor her nanny Wanda have any idea that Treasure is there.

Live-Action TV

• In the second series of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, the gang are staying in an empty mansion that is being converted into a retirement home. Barry hears a local ghost story about how the mansion is haunted, after which food starts disappearing from the refrigerator and objects start moving when the gang is out working. Barry thinks this is proof that the ghost story is true, but Oz gets to the bottom of the mystery by putting superglue on the fridge door handle; it turns out that the "ghost" was a homeless man who had been squatting at the house and hiding in a cupboard during the day. They give him some new clothes and money, and send him on his way instead of calling the police.
• The Brittas Empire: "Temple of the Body" reveals that, unbeknownst to anyone in the leisure centre, Carole, one of the employees who works there, has moved in after having been thrown out of her apartment between Series 1 and 2. This is not found out until Brittas, who was doing an unrelated search for a "love nest", stumbled upon the bedroom she had made up in one of the cupboards. Zig-zagged in that Brittas does threaten to kick her out once he finds out, but she does ultimately get to live there for the rest of the show.
• CSI has the appropriately named episode "Stalker", in which a guy becomes fixated on Nick and essentially lives in his attic, spying on him and recording him. He did it to other people too before Nick; he was a cable guy who became fixated on some of his customers and wanted their lives.
• Goosebumps (1995) has My Best Friend Is Invisible, where a not-so Imaginary Friend is revealed to actually be a regular boy, Brent Green, who has been turned invisible in order to be able to squat in his old home. The ending implies there are a number of humans who survived this way after the visible people, actually alien invaders, took over their planet, as once the parents become aware of Brent they immediately know what he is, turn him visible, and capture him.
• Terriers: Hank briefly thinks he's going mad when food starts disappearing from his house. It turns out that his mentally ill sister, Steph, is living in his attic. However, zigzagged in that he's perfectly happy to have her there when he finds out.
• The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window: The handyman Buell is revealed to have been living in Anna's attic. After she finds out, she lets him stay permanently.

Podcasts

• The podcast Criminal has an episode about a real-life case of this.

Video Games

• Knights of the Old Republic: The Stowaway quest has the player investigating pilfered rations in their Cool Starship the Ebon Hawk. The stowaway is something of a Wild Child who speaks a language she made up herself and you have to decipher in a bit of a dialogue puzzle. Or you can drive her off if you want dark side points.
• Nancy Drew:
  • In Message in a Haunted Mansion, Charlie, a handyman hired to renovate the titular mansion, has been living in one of its secret passages for some time. In fact, he got the job because he overheard the owners when they decided to start hiring. However, he's not the saboteur Nancy has been looking for — just a good kid down on his luck. If Nancy confronts him, he apologizes and promises to tell Rose — who presumably forgives him, given the tone of the epilogue.
  • In Warnings at Waverly Academy, Rachel's identical twin Kim lived in a secret passageway off her room, swapping out with her whenever it was needed, while everyone thought they were only talking to one person — "Rachel".
  • In Ghost of Thornton Hall, Harper has been hiding — and living — in the basement of Thornton Hall for an unspecified period of time, unknown to anyone until she alerted Jessalyn that she believed Clara had killed Charlotte.

Web Videos

• OhTekker's video "I Survived 100 Days Inside a Hidden Minecraft Base" involves him spending 100 days hiding in someone else's base, without them knowing about it, by scurrying around in the walls and making hidden passages a'la The People Under the Stairs. It requires him to constantly pound invisibility potions, carefully only mine when the base owner is far enough away to not hear him, and avoid direct eye contact since your potion particles become visible if someone looks directly at you. His plan is to even escalate to do the final 10 days wholly visible if he makes it that far. He gets spotted on Day 81 by opening his hidden passage at the wrong time, but decides to finish the challenge since he reasons that, while he got seen he still survived and the challenge was still on — he comes back and finishes the final 20-ish days.

Websites

• "Someone is hiding in my house and I didn't know" borders on being a subgenre of r/nosleep on Reddit. For example, see "Someone is hiding in my house", "I found a secret room in my house", and "Someone has been living in my house with me".

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: "The Nobody" has Gumball and Darwin being blamed for various things disappearing around the house, after which they learn that they have a squatter. They eventually catch him and learn that the squatter is their classmate Rob, corrupted by the Void.
• Numberjacks: The eponymous talking numbers, and their pets the Buddy Blocks, live inside a couch in a house belonging to a couple and their daughter Holly, without the family's knowledge. Unlike most Secret Squatters, the Numberjacks are on the side of good and solve problems caused by the show's antagonists (known as the "meanies").
• The Simpsons: In "The Ziff Who Came to Dinner", Bart and Lisa are traumatized after seeing a scary movie, and they think there's a killer in the house after hearing bumps in the night. It turns out to be Artie Ziff, who had been squatting in the attic after going broke.
• Smiling Friends: In "Desmond's Big Day Out", Alan, while looking for his stolen cheese and paperclips, finds a man living in the walls of Smiling Friends HQ, complete with computer and enough internet access to have something to hide... alongside a massive infestation of bliblies which proceed to overrun the building.

Real Life

• The story of Theodore Edward Coneys, better known as the "Denver Spider Man".^note No relation to that Spider-Man. One September evening in 1941, Coneys, hungry and homeless, broke into the house of Philip Peters in Denver, Colorado, and took up residence in a small attic crawlspace. He lived there for 5 weeks before Peters found him; a fight broke out, and Coneys bludgeoned the elderly Peters to death. He then returned to the attic and hid there while the police searched for the mysterious assailant. Thereafter, Peters' wife, housekeeper, and neighbors all came to believe the house was haunted, hearing strange noises and seeing lights going on and off at night. It was only after 9 months that Coneys was finally discovered, and spent the rest of his life in prison.
• George Michael had a stalker who, apparently stayed in his house for four days, while he was there.
• This woman, who kept her lover locked in the attic for around 17 years, letting him out when her husband wasn't home.

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