A video on TikTok in which a lady creepily stares out of a window has gone viral. The 54-second clip, which starts with ominous music, initially suggests the lady is spying on the New York couple filming her. However, everything isn’t as it seems.
A user called @mrii_s uploaded the video, captioned “Saving lives one window at a time.” The video describes how the lady kept appearing sporadically at the window throughout the night. Then, the following morning, the couple awakened to discover the lady had left a note at the window saying, “HELP!”
They called the New York City Police Department at that point, concerned about the lady’s predicament. Was she being held hostage? Was there an intruder she was trying to escape from? Was her house on fire? Was she having some kind of upsetting mental health episode? As it turned out, the answer was far more straightforward and less dark.
The video continues with @mrii_s’ partner on the telephone with the NYPD, reporting the incident and then speaking to them again, asking what happened. It’s explained to him that the lady was asking for help because she’d locked herself in her bathroom! The final shot is of another note left by the lady, which reads “THANK YOU SO MUCH” and has a pair of hearts drawn on it — she obviously appreciated that the police were called in response to her first sign.
How did TikTok react?
Many users pointed out that they could see the lady yelling “help” at the start of the video, which is indeed the case. Others were more doubtful of the woman’s authenticity and questioned how she managed to write a help sign when she was locked in the bathroom. One user wrote, “How did she just happen to have a full page of paper and a pen in the bathroom,” with others nodding their head along, quipping that “the bathroom is the last place I’d find paper and pencil.”
Someone had an answer to the above quandary, however, as they wrote, “Everyone asking why she has paper and pen obvi never been to an old lady’s house… my GMA-in law has a full on sudoku, magazines, crosswords, pens pencils etc.”
One user shared a heartbreaking story that seconds the above-shared logic.
“My mother with dementia does this. This was my first thought. Stuck in bathroom.”
Most users commended the couple for helping the lady, lauding them for “noticing and responding” to her pleas for help instead of being heartless bystanders witnessing her plight. “Thank you for doing something. There a phenomenon where people do nothing, assuming that someone else will call or has already done something.” one wrote. It is a sad truth and that’s what makes the couple the rare jewels hard to find today.
As Healthline explains, the phenomenon mentioned above is called the bystander effect. A well-known study about it found that 75 percent of bystanders who are alone will help when they think a person is in trouble. However, when a group of six people is together, only 31 percent will help. In the situation shown in this TikTok, a household of two people helped. Thank goodness there weren’t six of them as evidently, the lady would then have run the risk of experiencing a cruel example of stunted humanity.