Man mistaken for a ghost jailed after getting caught inside student’s closet

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It was not a monster nor a ghost one student found inside her closet, but a 30-year-old man wearing her clothes.

Maddie, a student of University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and her roommates are still confused as to how 30-year-old Andrew Swofford got inside their apartment

Maddie, who lives at the Summit at the Edge Apartments on Oakland Avenue, had been missing items of clothing such as shirts and pants, as per Fox 8 on Feb. 4. Hand prints, too, had been left behind on the bathroom wall.

At first, Maddie and her roommates thought the apartment was being haunted by a ghost. Except, this was not what she discovered when she checked her closet on Saturday, Feb. 2.

“I just hear rattling in my closet. It sounded like a raccoon in my closet,” she said in the report. “I’m like ‘who’s there?’ And somebody answers me. He’s like ‘oh my name is Drew.’”

She said she opened the door and found Swofford inside wearing all of her clothes. “My socks. My shoes. And he has a book bag full of my clothes.”

“He tries on my hat. He goes in the bathroom and looks in the mirror and then is like ‘you’re really pretty, can I give you a hug?” she added. “But he never touched me.”

Swofford has since been arrested and appeared in court on Monday, Feb. 4, via video conference from the Guilford County Jail. As per the report, he is jailed under a $26,000 (P1.3 million) bond on 14 counts of felony, including larceny and identity theft.

What alarms Maddie and her roommates is that this is not the first time a stranger had been inside their apartment. Last December, they also discovered two men in their living room. They alerted the leasing office and had an employee change their locks, but this incident was not reported to the police.

Finding Swofford inside her closet was the last straw, as she and her roommates are finally moving out. Cody Cepeda/JB

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