Willow and Hearth

Olivia Mack, who posts on TikTok as @oamack, had her hand on the deadbolt. Someone had knocked on her apartment door in the middle of a workday, typed on her keypad and worked the handle up and down, and she assumed it was maintenance. Then, she says, something in her gut told her to look through the peephole first.

A man she did not know was standing there. She knocked back from inside to see whether he would say who he was. “He doesn’t say anything,” she says. As she kept watching, she says, he raised his hands beside the peephole and dragged them down the door. “He literally made claw marks in my door.”

Mack tells the story from the front seat of a car, a white dog on the seat behind her, under the on-screen line “someone tried to break into my apartment in the middle of the day.” She says it happened “a few days ago” while she was working from home. When she gets to the scraping, a photo of the door appears on screen, showing the peephole and the keypad lock.

What nearly got her to open it was a run of ordinary explanations. She had just received a package notification, so her first thought was a delivery, though she notes those usually show up hours after the alert. Then came the keypad. “I automatically think maintenance is here,” she says, “because that’s the only time someone’s ever typed on my keypad in the middle of the day.”

Two things sat at the back of her mind. Nobody had announced themselves, and she had no notification saying maintenance was due that day. The handle kept moving, but the deadbolt held.

After the marks on the door, she says, “my heart sinks.” Her thought, as she recalls it: “Oh my gosh, I almost let this person into my house.” She says she started having a panic attack and tried her mom, her neighbor and her boyfriend, “just trying to get anyone on the phone.” Her first fear was that the man knew she was working from home alone.

The neighbor picked up. The two became friends when Mack moved in, and the neighbor sent her the number of the maintenance man they both know. Mack says she called him in tears and told him, “Someone just tried to break in. I don’t know what to do.” He told her he and a second maintenance man would be right over.

When they knocked, she checked that it was them before she opened the door. She says he promised they would not leave her alone and that they were “surveying the area” to find the man. She closed the door and locked it again. Her boyfriend, reached in the middle of his own workday, got his boss’s approval to come and take her to his house.

Then the maintenance man called back. They had found him. According to what she was told, he had been doing the same thing at several apartments. She says nobody knows how he got into the building, where “everything is password protected,” and her guess is that someone let him in by accident.

She says the maintenance men told her he was talking about children being kidnapped and killed, and she describes him as mentally unwell. Police came. “I don’t really know what happened with him after that,” she says.

By her own telling, three things were off before she ever looked outside: the package was too early, maintenance had sent no notice, and whoever was at the door was trying the handle without saying a word. For a renter in a building with keypad entry, an unannounced code attempt with no maintenance notice on your phone is the cue to keep your hand off the lock.

The order she ended up following: the deadbolt stays locked, you look through the peephole, then you knock or speak through the closed door and wait for the person to say who they are and why they are there.

Mack says even an answer should not have been enough. If the man had said something and she had wondered whether he was supposed to be there, her advice is the same: “Call the people you know who can intervene, like your maintenance man, security, anyone, just to do a double check.”

She did not have the maintenance man’s direct number when she needed it. It reached her through a neighbor while she was panicking. Save it now, along with building security if your complex has it and at least one neighbor. On that last one she is specific: “When you find great people at your apartment complex, hold on to them and get their number.”

When help arrives, check the peephole again before you open, as she did. And take a picture of the door. A photo of the marks and the time it happened gives building management something to act on, and in her building the man turned out to have tried other doors.

Her last word on opening up for a visit you were not expecting: “Your safety is so much more important than a missed appointment or someone coming to your apartment to fix something.”