"Beagleman, stop building my coffin at 3am, I'm trying to watch the Big Brother live feed."

And here we have a delightful tale about how I shouldn't be alive right now. 

I'd like to add at this point that certain details of this story, when I first relayed it to my mother a while back, were left out so as not to freak her out... I'll add those in this time. Sorry, mum.

Just over three years ago, I moved into a grotty little bedsit in Dorset. I loved my grotty little bedsit. It was everything a person could want in a grotty little bedsit and more. I had a chair, a four hundred year old television, a bay window (oooo-OOOH!) and MY OWN KITCHEN. Yes, you heard right. Not only that, but I had a bed that was mounted a grand six feet off the floor that required me to access it with a ladder. Somehow I never fell to my death barrel rolling in the middle of the night, and for that, I'm thankful.

The building itself was split over three floors, with roughly four flats per floor. Each floor had a shared toilet room, and a shared shower (I know.) On my floor lived a fairly young bricklayer type called Rob who had his daughter to stay every few weeks. She always looked like she wanted to cry when she stepped into our building as it had the faint odour of cat piss and whiskey. Next to him was Graham, a forty-something single guy who stank of weed and always "popped over" to ask if he could borrow my TV antenna. I always said no. 

I was lucky enough to be in the flat next to someone who I will from this moment on refer to as "Beagleman." 

The reason for this affectionate nickname is as follows... In the entire six months that I lived in that flat, I only saw him three times - usually when I was coming home from/leaving for work and he was going into the bathroom to do a poo. Not once in these three meetings did I see his face. Not because he had his back to me, but because he was wearing A F*CKING LATEX BEAGLE MASK. For reference purposes, it looked something like this:

Yes, I know.

Once I decided that saying "Hello" was probably polite given that he was my (mentally dysfunctional) next door neighbour. He just sort of stood there looking at me blankly and then gave me a muffled "Hi." and if that isn't terrifying enough, he then continued to stare at me until I got back into my flat and put the chain across faster than I thought was possible.

Back when I was still a dirty smoker, I would stand outside the front door of the building and have a cigarette under the security light so that my bachelorette pad didn't smell like an ashtray. The front door was at the side of the house, as part of a spooky alleyway that led to another house with it's own bizarre little miniature car-park further down. 

Unfortunately, it wasn't a very good security light, and was more for getting-your-key-in-the-door-at-night purposes than for protecting me from nutters. It would stay on for about twenty seconds and then go off, requiring me to flail my arms around frantically until it came back on. Not only that, but it only seemed to light the area directly below it, meaning that anything further than two feet away was some sort of black abyss. One evening I stood there, freezing my bananas off, and every time the security light went off I would hear slow footsteps coming towards me down the gravel pathway. Being as how I could only see two feet in front of me when the light came back on, I tried to repress my absolute terror and ignore it. The footsteps stopped. Twenty seconds later the light went out and the same thing happened again... and then again. After suffering from a rabbit in the headlights moment, I stepped back inside and locked the door behind me. I never smoked outside again.

For the weeks that followed, it seemed that Beagleman was using powertools at all hours to construct what I can only assume was my coffin. Not only that, but he seemed to take a liking to randomly knocking on the wall between us, or worse still... on my front door. I would hear a quiet knock knock knocking for about five minutes, before he would give up and leave. I knew it was him because I could hear him walk away and go back into his flat. There were also numerous times that I could hear somebody tampering with my lock.

Creepy enough already right? WRONG.

Fast forward a few weeks, and I walked into work, hung up my coat and washed my hands ready for a normal working day. My supervisor came up to me and said "Oh, I thought you weren't coming in today!" Confused, I asked her why. "Well, your dad called us this morning to tell us you were ill and weren't going to be in for a few days so I assumed you weren't coming today."

I'll tell you why this is bullsh*t. Firstly, I wasn't living with my dad. Secondly, I wasn't ill, and thirdly, my dad didn't even live in the same country as me at the time.

Still totally confused I asked if she was sure the call was meant for me. She stated that it definitely was because [I was] the only Laura to work [there] for years and he called the kitchen directly rather than going through head office, so he knew the transfer number. I'm fairly sure a little bit of wee dribbled out at this point and I felt like somebody had just walked over my grave. Clearly Beagleman had some sort of plans for me that didn't quite work out the way he thought they would. I've no idea how he knew my name, and I can only assume that he knew where I worked based on my uniform and possibly overhearing me talking to people on the phone through the wall with some sort of ear-horn contraption.

Very shortly after that I moved to London, and not long after *that,* a friend of mine still living in Bournemouth called to see if I was okay as my building had been bulldozed. I didn't ever receive a letter stating that it was to be destroyed.

So, since then, as much as I love dogs... I do shiver a bit if I ever see a Beagle coming towards me.

And people wonder why I've got Anxiety Disorder.