I had a tacit agreement with a homeless guy I discovered one day sleeping in my car. I'll keep the doors unlocked and you don't mess it up and by 7 am you're gone. He was by far the best tenant I ever had, we did this for close to two years and then I moved. The area where I lived was an older industrial zone in the East of Amsterdam, there wasn't a whole lot around there other than a salvation army post and I figured he liked the backseat of my Citroen DS better than the cots and 4-to-a-room arrangement that they had there.
A couple years ago one of the devs I work with came in to the office very early for some reason and discovered a man sleeping in one of the conference rooms. After the fact we discovered that an emergency exit door wasn’t locking properly.<p>He didn’t take anything even though he could have easily made off with tens of thousands of dollars of electronics. He just needed somewhere to sleep.
This read like it could have been a chapter out of a Stephen King novel, until the stranger saved the puppy:<p>> I got a puppy. While she was being toilet-trained, I kept her in the bathroom. One day, when I was out, the apartment flooded. I came home to find the puppy in the sink. She was tiny. I didn’t know how she could have got up there unless someone had put her there to save her.
This reminded me of my aunt, who recently expressed concerns like this. Someone uses my toothpaste, "I just bought this tube a few weeks ago and it is almost empty" for example. And similar with ice cream etc. Thing is, it was her. She has recently been committed to a facility with Alzheimer's. At certain times, as the disease drifts in and out, she is quite present and sane, and cannot explain to herself the lost time any other way.
There was the guy who dug a secret underground bunker under Hampstead heath: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/mar/05/invisible-city-how-homeless-man-built-life-underground-bunker-hampstead-heath" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/mar/05/invisible-city-...</a>
If you have nothing better to do, many of the "Experience" series in The Guardian are a fun read: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/experience" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/experience</a>
Many many years ago I got kicked out of student halls at university. I used to keep my stuff in my lockers and sleep in the bathing rooms all night. If people tried to use one I'd yell "In the bath". One time I slept in a student lounge behind some sofas and very late a couple came in and made out, and I remained as still as I could. As they left the girl said "I could swear there was someone else in there" haha.
When I was cycling between Lisbon wnd Istanbul I made sure to either sleep far from view or to be as obnoxiously visible as possible (calling the local municipality, cleaning around campsite, knocking doors of farms nearby) precisely to avoid scaring people. I was lucky enough to do my homelessness as a choice, I can only imagine how many persons do this in city environments ourbof need of a shelter.
In 2009 there was a Finnish woman who lived inside the buildings of the Berlin Tegel airport, for several months. She was mentally disturbed.<p><a href="https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/escape-to-berlin-finnish-woman-lived-at-the-airport-for-two-months-a-612934.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/escape-to-berli...</a>
‘The Secret Apartment’ is the story of a Vietnam vet who claims to have lived in Veterans Stadium for years<p><a href="https://www.inquirer.com/news/the-secret-apartment-vet-stadium-20210309.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.inquirer.com/news/the-secret-apartment-vet-stadi...</a>