Anyone else heard footsteps on the stairs at night that stop right outside the bedroom door?

Mate yes, Cardiff terraced house, lived here two years and it happens at least twice a month. Always between 2 and 4am, always stops right outside my room, never comes in. Measured the floorboards once to see if it was thermal expansion or whatever and the pattern is completely wrong for that - thermal creaking doesn't have a rhythm or a pause, it just pops randomly. What gets me is the pause. Something about the deliberate stop right at the door is what makes it feel intentional rather than just the house settling.

Anyone tracked whether it correlates with anything, like weather, lunar cycles, recent activity in the house? I've started logging mine and theres a loose pattern around new moon but I only have eight months of data so its not conclusive yet. Would be really useful to pool notes if others are doing the same.

@BoldEmber the thermal expansion theory gets thrown around a lot for this and honestly it does account for some cases, old floorboards contracting as the house cools overnight can sound remarkably like footsteps. But here's the thing - thermal movement doesn't stop in one specific spot consistently. That's what makes your case worth paying attention to. The repetition and the precise location outside your door is the bit that rules out most mundane explanations for me.

I had similar in my old place in Keswick for about three years. Never came in either. What I'd suggest is start logging it properly, date, time, temperature that night, anything unusual that day. Patterns become clearer when you have data. Also worth noting whether you feel any drop in temperature or pressure in the room when it happens.

@BoldEmber the stopping-outside-the-door detail is what gets me. Thermal expansion doesn't know where your bedroom is. I've logged something similar in three different Sheffield properties over the years and the consistent thing is always that spatial specificity - it's not random, it's directional. The old pareidolia/pattern-recognition argument only goes so far before you have to ask why the pattern is always architecturally meaningful. Would be interested to know if your house has a clear sightline from teh bottom of the stairs to your door, because in two of my cases the route the sounds traced matched exactly the most direct path a person would take walking up to that room.