The unemployment crisis is at such a low these days (or high, depending on how you look at it) that iffy one-and-done jobs advertised on Craigslist suddenly seem more appealing. That said, one TikTok user has a story which may make even the most cash-strapped amongst us think twice before responding to a Craigslist ad that sets off warning bells.
TikToker @ashleeinc specializes in sharing unsettling or spooky stories sent in by her followers, and one such startling true story was given to her by a man named Vic. The Springfield, Missouri resident was in desperate need of some fast money so he applied to a Craigslist job that was for a one-day hire with immediate “insanely good” payment and no experience required whatsoever. The guy who hired him asked Vic to meet him in a “parking lot of a half-abandoned strip mall.”
The guy, Caucasian and in his 50s, turned up in a white van, dressed in baseball cap and sunglasses, and handed Vic $700 and a key — Vic had been hired to clean out an old house by the end of the day. The place turned out to be a “nightmare house,” and when Vic opened the door he was faced with a smell that was an “awful mix of rotting wood, mold, and not quite death but something like it.” As for the house’s contents, it was “as if whoever lived there had just upped one day and left.”
Some of the creepy curios Vic discovered include towers of old newspapers going back decades, jars of filthy old water stacked around the place that sported strange labels like “Monday” or “Blue,” and even just a pile of dirt in a corner of the kitchen. Moving into a back-room, he found “faint greasy handprints that were the size of a child’s” on the walls, reaching all the way up to the ceiling.
The biggest mystery? The trunk. In the master bedroom was absolutely nothing but a very old, very heavy locked trunk. Unable to move it, Vic cleaned out the rest of the house and when he was done he messaged the guy who hired him. “Did you get rid of the trunk?” was all the guy responded. When Vic told him he didn’t, he replied, “Did you open it?” Upon denying he did, the man again asked. “Are you sure you didn’t open it?”
Later that night, the weirdness of the whole situation was keeping Vic up so he googled the address: it turns out the previous owner had disappeared two years previously and, to this day, no one knows what happened to him.
You can guess what everyone’s main question was after watching this: what, in the name of all that is holy, was in that trunk? “I wanna know what is in the trunk now,” demanded one comment, as another admitted, “Okay I’ll never not be thinking about what was in the trunk!!!!!!” As for Ashlee’s own thoughts, she gave her take in the comments: “Ok my first thought was the body but then if the guy was missing they would’ve probably checked the house first.”
One level-headed viewer chimed in with some much-needed clarification on the situation. “So discounting the trunk, this kind of sounds like a bank foreclosure or a tax foreclosure clean out job. This is pretty often how it goes. Especially for missing people, it’s really like they just Up and left one day,” they demystified. “The banks go through a third-party which hires 1099 contractors and those 1099 guys often go on craigslist for clean outs like this.”
That’s all well and good, but there’s one thing that’s keeping people skeptical about there being a perfectly innocent explanation at work here. You see, Springfield, Missouri has an unfortunate reputation. It is, after all, Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s hometown. As one comment put it, “This is SO Springfield.”