My Neighbor Isn’t Human — I Have Proof

I’ve lived in my apartment complex in Portland, Oregon, for six years. It’s a quiet neighborhood — retirees, students, a few families. The kind of place where nothing ever happens. That changed the day Apartment 3B got a new tenant.

Her name was **Elara**. She moved in late one evening in the middle of winter. No moving truck, no friends helping, just a single black suitcase and a cat carrier with no cat inside. I remember because I offered to help, but she just stared at me for a moment before saying, “No need. I already brought everything I require.”

That word — *require* — stuck in my head. It wasn’t the way people talked.

At first, I didn’t think much of her. She kept to herself, didn’t make noise, didn’t socialize. But after a few weeks, I started noticing small, strange things.

Every night, exactly at **2:37 a.m.**, a faint hum came from her apartment — low, rhythmic, mechanical. Like a generator or some kind of machine. I’d press my ear against the wall and hear soft clicking sounds, like typing but faster than any human could manage.

Then there was the light. Her apartment window glowed with a pale blue tint, the kind that doesn’t come from any normal bulb. When I asked our landlord about it, he shrugged. “She pays on time, doesn’t cause trouble. Let it be.”

Still, curiosity got the best of me.

One night, I pretended to leave for work but circled back and waited outside her door. Around the usual time — 2:30 — the humming began. Through the peephole, I saw faint shadows flickering under her door. And then, a sound I’ll never forget: a metallic scraping, followed by a whisper that didn’t sound like a person’s voice.

It said something like:

> “Transmission stable. Awaiting next human data set.”

I froze.

The next morning, I knocked on her door, trying to act casual. She opened it slightly — not wide enough for me to see inside. Her eyes looked… wrong. Not just the color — they reflected light, like a cat’s in the dark. I noticed she wore gloves, even though it was warm inside.

I asked if everything was okay last night. She smiled — but the smile didn’t reach her eyes. “Just my *equipment*,” she said. “Sometimes it needs calibration.”

I nodded, pretending to understand, and left.

After that, things escalated. Birds stopped perching near her balcony. My Wi-Fi would drop every time she came home. My phone started showing a new network signal named **E-3B_DEVICE** — with full bars, even in airplane mode.

One night, my curiosity turned into fear. I was asleep when I heard knocking on my door — three slow knocks. When I checked the peephole, no one was there. But when I opened it, a folded piece of paper was on the floor. It said:

> “Stop listening.”

No signature. No explanation.

The next day, I went to the building’s security office and asked to see the footage from the hallway. The guard told me the cameras outside her apartment had been *disabled* since the day she moved in.

That’s when I decided to record her myself. I set up a small camera facing her door. That night, the 2:37 hum began again. The next morning, my camera was gone — not broken or unplugged — just gone, like it had never been there.

Two nights later, Elara knocked on *my* door for the first time.
She said, “Your curiosity is inefficient. You’ll forget soon.”
I tried to laugh it off, but she stepped closer, her pupils flickering with faint static. “You record,” she said softly, “but you don’t understand what you see.”

When I woke up the next day, my laptop and phone were wiped clean. Every file, every photo, every password — gone. The only thing left on my desktop was a single folder named **RETURNED**. Inside it was one image: a picture of me sleeping, timestamped 2:38 a.m.

That night, she moved out. No one saw her leave. The landlord said her lease had been terminated by “an external agency.”

I don’t know what she was — government experiment, alien, something else entirely. But I know this: sometimes, at exactly 2:37 a.m., my walls still hum.

And when that happens, my phone lights up with a notification from a network that shouldn’t exist:
**E-3B_DEVICE connected.**