Upon returning home from her vacation, she discovered a living nightmare. When she came home, she saw something that no homeowner should ever see.
Her blood was boiling at the injustice of it all as she surveyed the group that had gathered. She was starting to worry that they would never leave. She had a few options left, but none of them were pleasant.
Crystal Taylor bought a large house in Broken Arrow, close to Tulsa in northeast Oklahoma. The property, which seemed like the place of her dreams, sported a luxurious pool and a spacious garage.
Crystal headed off on a break to Cabo in the summer. What she didn’t know was that her house was not safe without her there, people were watching.
Down on the Mexican coast, Crystal’s house was out of sight, out of mind. However, 1,250 miles away, darkness was falling in Broken Arrow, and a large group of people was preparing to make their way into Crystal’s home.
At around 3:00 a.m., neighbors caught sight of something suspicious happening by the garage door.
The uninvited group forced the garage door up. They would use this as their main entry point to the house. They acted like they were free to enter and leave the property as they pleased.
The group made themselves comfortable as if it was their own home. This handsome home was, for all intents and purposes, no longer Crystal’s.
The “new tenants” then decided they were settled enough to bring in their pets, including five cats and a dog, who from then on began living in the house with them.
They settled down in the rooms, threw down mattresses, and moved their possessions in. Now it was clearly time to throw a housewarming pool party…
While she was away for a week and a half, Crystal was blissfully unaware of the goings-on back in Broken Arrow. However, her neighbors were no doubt growing increasingly concerned.
South of the border, Crystal received a call about her uninvited guests and immediately booked a return flight. Stepping through her front door, she was blindsided.
In less than two weeks, the place she used to call home had undergone a horrifying transformation.
That was when she called BAPD officers to help her get her house back. But they could not find any evidence of a break-in, so they made no arrests. Instead, they issued a warning to the group for trespassing.
Crystal soon realized that her house had sustained thousands of dollars worth of damage. There was paint on the walls and litter boxes for the animals in every room. Along with cigarette butts and garbage strewn all over the place, there were stains absolutely everywhere.
Furthermore, the new wood floors had been severely damaged, and electronics had actually been pulled from the walls.
The thing that truly turned Crystal’s stomach was when she opened the fridge to find roaches scuttling around inside.
She said that she had also found bedbugs on the property as well. “It’s all dirty. It just feels dirty,” she told Inside Edition. But what could she do about it now? How could she make the squatters learn their lesson?
Asked what the property looked like when she returned from Cabo, she told News On 6, “It was awful. It looked like I was in some homeless shelter with mattresses everywhere.”
She added, “It was a shock. I didn’t understand how people could do that… I was so furious, but there was nothing I could do.”
Crystal was furious that no arrests were made for breaking and entering, and there was a reason for that. There was one significant detail that made the police officer’s job more difficult, however.
The so-called squatters said that they found the property available for rent on Craigslist. They were even able to show that they had a signed rental lease.
Upon closer inspection, the rental form showed that it listed the owner of the house as being one, Steven Parker.
And after some investigation, Crystal found a box of blank lease forms in the garage – Had the squatters faked their own rental agreement? According to one squatter, Cherie, she had been given a key.
She told Inside Edition, “It was the second or third day [when] we noticed our keys didn’t turn. I’m sorry. I had nothing to do with it.”
She said that when her key stopped working, she and her fellow residents then entered the house via the garage – apparently without being concerned about what had happened. “I am innocent in this,” Cherie said. “I didn’t scam anyone.”
Another member of the group, Dale Makins, admitted that the circumstances of their move-in might well have seemed suspicious. “I know it reeks, it looks bad on us, but with the lease, we got Shanghaied,” Dale told News On 6.
“She’s being nice enough to let us get our stuff. We’ll go to another place. We’re going to research the house before we even move in.”
After Crystal, the home’s rightful owner, returned, she wanted to see justice done and the culprits punished, however. Crystal told News On 6, “It should be breaking and entering.”
“They broke into my home, they crawled underneath the garage, they have vandalized my home. They have brought roaches and bedbugs into the house, and nothing is being done.” Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened.
Unfortunately, the squatting phenomenon is at an all-time high. There are different causes for this; for starters, the housing market is more competitive now than ever before in most parts of the Western world.
For seconds, laws are often too lenient and often enable squatters to stay in an occupied property for months before being evacuated by law enforcement. But that’s not all.
A lot of times, squatters can cause a great deal of damage not only to the property but also to the homeowners’ mental and emotional well-being.
Cases like Crystal’s are already bad enough as it is. However, sometimes things can get much, much grimmer and quickly turn into real horror stories. That’s what happened to our next protagonist.
Keisha, aged 28, was born and raised in Port Arthur, near Houston, Texas. Ever since she was a kid, she knew the value, importance, and rewards of hard work.
She worked her way through college, began a career in the hotel business, and ended up becoming the owner of two houses by the time she turned 25.
Everyone in her family was proud of Keisha. Not only had she been the first member of the family to go to university, but she had also been the one who had reached the most rapid and crushing success.
Keisha herself was as proud of her achievements as she could be, and she had her very own reasons for it.
Every time she contemplated her possessions and the place she was in life, she remembered all the hard work and dedication that it had cost her to get that far.
There was nothing more satisfying to her than knowing that everything she had, she had gotten on her own. No one could take that away from her, or at least that’s what she thought.
It was almost the end of the summer; after a long and busy peak season, Keisha was exhausted and looking forward to some much-needed vacation.
So one day, she decided to use the vacation days she had left that year and start looking for a destination. She didn’t know it yet, but that would be a move she would soon regret.
She considered different destinations where she could spend some days away from Houston and wind down before getting back to work.
There were a few available options, some more expensive than others; Las Vegas looked really tempting to Keisha, but she would spend a significant amount of money. Was she really ready to make that kind of expense?
She didn’t really know if she was ready to splurge to that extent. After all, Keisha watched the news every day, and she was well aware that hard times were coming.
As a financially sensible person, Keisha didn’t really feel too comfortable spending a lot of money on leisure activities, even if she had it. But right then, she realized something; there was something she could do to cover her vacation.
She could rent her place to someone else while she was away. It seemed like a win-win situation; someone would take care of the house, and they would be paying rent, so that would make Keisha’s expenses significantly lighter.
Immediately, she put up an ad on Airbnb, unaware of how much she would end up regretting her decision.
In no time, she received numerous messages from different people interested in spending a few days visiting Houston. She ended up choosing one of the applicants, a woman in her 40s who said she would be in Houston for the week.
Keisha never met her in person until the day she left for the airport. Maybe that was her mistake.
Right before Keisha took a cab to the airport, the woman showed up at her door and Keisha handed her the keys. She repeated the terms to her; she was supposed to leave in a week, three days before returning from Las Vegas.
The woman seemed normal, polite, and easygoing, so Keisha didn’t suspect anything. Nothing in the world could have prepared Keisha for the type of nightmare she was signing up for.
After a week of fun in Las Vegas, Keisha got on the plane back home. She left the cab and inserted the keys in the lock. But after opening the door, she found something appalling.
The woman was still there. Keisha found her sitting on her couch, watching TV. “What are you doing here? You were supposed to be gone 3 days ago,” Keisha said. The woman’s response made her knees weak.
All she said was, “I ain’t going nowhere.” Then, she got up, walked to the guest’s’ room, and locked herself in. Keisha’s head was spinning. Where did she get the nerve?
She realized there was not much she could do. If she tried to remove her from the house by force, she could get charged with assault.
“She is still here in my house, refusing to leave. So, I don’t know what to do,” Keisha says in a TikTok video where she shares her story, expressing her frustration.
She tried to get her evicted, but it wasn’t easy at all. “I had to go through protocols and all the legal blasé,” she says. “The police were right in my house, and I told them to get her out now and they are like, oh, she is a tenant now.”
In the video the woman posted on TikTok, the squatter can be seen saying, “This is my place,” before shutting a door in the homeowner’s face. “Excuse me, you can record all you want. I ain’t going nowhere,” she adds. “Don’t touch that doo, or I’m calling the police on you.”
In order to protect the privacy of those depicted, some names, locations, and identifying characteristics have been changed and are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblances to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.
