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The porch light is on. The lamp in the front room is on. There's a bulb burning in the hallway that you leave going all night because a dark hallway makes the house feel bigger and emptier than it is. And a man on the sidewalk across the street takes all of that in for about 8 seconds and decides one person lives there. He's usually right. Lights never told anybody how many people are inside a house. Habits do. And the people who live alone are handing that information out every single day with every bulb in the place burning. Like this video if it helped. Subscribe if you want the next one. I'm Roy Callahan. 26 years in police work, the first half in a patrol car, and the back half in plain clothes working property crime, which mostly meant sitting across a table from men who broke into houses for a living and asking them how they chose. I expected them to talk about locks. They almost never did. What they talked about was reading. One of them told me he could tell a single occupant house from the end of the block on a Tuesday afternoon and be right nine times out of 10. And after a few hundred of those conversations, I believed him. So, here are 15 habits that tell a burglar you live alone. Lights and all, counting down to the one that matters more than the other 14 put together. Before I get into it, one thing quick. Folks have been asking for everything I teach on this channel written down in one place instead of scattered across old videos. So, I did. You can find it all in the Lock the Door Behind Me ebook collection over at roycallahanbooks.com laid out step by step with the actual checklist and the exact order I do it in. Scan the QR code on screen or click the link in the pinned comment down below and it'll take you straight to the site. Back to it. Number 15. The way your lights travel through the house. A house with three people in it lights up sloppy. The kitchen is on while somebody's bedroom is on while the bathroom light has been burning for 2 hours because a teenager walked away from it. It's disorganized and disorganization reads as population. One person lights one room at a time and shuts it off on the way out because that's how a careful adult moves through their own house. From the street, that pattern is easy to follow. Front room goes dark, hallway goes bright, hallway goes dark, back bedroom comes on. Anybody watching just followed one body down a floor plan without seeing a face. The fix is a lamp and about $4 a year in electricity. Leave a light burning in a room you're not in. A table lamp in the back bedroom while you sit in the front. A light over the kitchen sink that stays on while the den is lit. You want two or three rooms glowing at once that one person could not possibly occupy at the same time. That's the whole trick. And it works because it breaks the thing he's actually reading, which is the sequence. Number 14. Timers set to the minute. Timers are good. I recommend them, but most people set one lamp to snap on at 7:00 and off at 10:30. And then it does exactly that, seven nights a week in July and in December, whether you're home or in Florida. Real households do not run on that kind of schedule. Real households forget. A house where the same lamp lights at the same minute for 11 straight nights is a house running on a machine. And a person watching for two or three evenings picks it up without effort. Buy a second timer. Run two lamps on different schedules, one coming on around dinner and one around 8:30. And use the randomized setting if your timer has one because most of the cheap ones do. Now, put a radio on a timer in a back room. And when you leave for 4 days, change something before you go instead of letting the exact same show run without an audience. The best money I ever saw a homeowner spend on this was $18 on smart plugs she set to fire at odd minutes. 647 912. Because odd minutes look like decisions and even ones look like equipment. Number 13. One screen, one room, one glow. Television light is distinctive from the street, bluish, jumpy, and it tells the truth about where a body is sitting. In most single occupant houses, that glow shows up in the same window every evening for 4 hours, and there's nothing else lit anywhere on that side of the house. Then it goes out and within 90 seconds, the bedroom lamp comes on. And 30 minutes after that, the house is dark. That is a complete report on your evening and you gave it away for free while sitting on your own couch. Sound is what fixes this because sound leaves a house differently than light does. A cheap speaker or a clock radio in the kitchen playing talk radio at a low volume from 6 until 10 means somebody standing at your back fence hears two people in that house. A voice carries through a closed window in a way a television against the far wall doesn't. And it costs you the price of a sandwich. One time. Put it in the room farthest from where you actually sit. Number 12. Blinds and curtains that never move. Walk out front and look at your own windows the way a stranger would. The blinds you use are at whatever angle you left them this morning. The blinds on the spare room, the dining room, the bedroom nobody sleeps in anymore have been at that exact slat angle since spring. There's a dust line on them proving it. That's a house where one person operates about a third of the windows and the rest are decoration. Nobody expects you to work every blind in the house every day. But go change two of them and change them again in a week. Open the spare room curtain in the morning and close it at night for a few days. Then leave it half open. Slat angles that vary say more than an alarm sign does because an alarm sign is something you bought and a moved curtain is something a person did. Number 11, the single track. This one is seasonal and it's brutal. After a snow, there's one path from the door to the car, shoveled about the width of one set of shoulders with one set of footprints in it. In the fall, there's one worn strip through the leaves. In the driveway, tire ruts in the same two lines on the porch, one chair, one coffee cup ring on the rail, one pair of gardening gloves on the step. You don't have to fake a family. Just stop setting the scene for one. Shovel the walk wide enough for two people to pass. Put a second chair on the porch, even a folding one, even one that never gets sat in. Leave a big pair of work boots by the door. A size or two larger than anything you own. Because a man's size 12 boot on a porch does a specific job. And when you back the car out, park it somewhere different next time, an arm's length over. Sameness is the signal. Break it cheap. Number 10. What you type into the delivery app. I like drivers. Drivers are not the problem. The problem is that the note you wrote once 3 years ago is stored in a system and it gets read aloud on your porch by a phone in somebody's hand. Leave it behind the planter. I'm at work until 6. Nobody home during the day. Just put it inside the screen door. Side gate is unlocked. You published your schedule and your entry point in the same sentence. Then the boxes stack on the step, four of them. Every label carrying one name, first initial, and last. And that pile does its own arithmetic for anybody walking by. Rewrite the instruction today. Location only. No timing, no gate, no promise about who is or isn't inside. Get the boxes off the step the same day. And if that's impossible because you work, send the good stuff to a pickup locker or to your workplace. I've stood in more than one entryway looking at a delivery instruction on a homeowner's own phone that told a stranger more than a week of surveillance would have. Number nine, what the glass beside your door shows. Most front doors have glass somewhere near them, a sidelight, a window in the door, a storm door with a clear panel. Get outside your own house and look through it. In a single occupant home, you will usually see one coat on a
