- Slugs are bed enough when they’re in your yard, but wait until they find your doorbell.
The doorbell rings, but once you go see who the visitor is, there’s nobody there. You’ve been ding dong ditched!
This famous prank is usually associated with mischievous kids making a speedy escape. However, recent events show that you don’t need to be fast to get away with it.
In fact, you can be as slow as a snail, or a slug.
Residents of an apartment building in Germany called the police when a prankster wouldn’t stop buzzing their doorbells late at night. The cops came over, expecting to find one or more ill-behaved teenagers tormenting their neighbors.
However, no kids were arrested that night. The officers, together with concerned residents, soon discovered that the troublemaker ringing the apartment building’s doorbells was a slug that had been crawling across the touch-sensitive activation plate.
According to the police, the culprit was arrested. Based on the latest reports, the slug was then released at a nearby grass patch after a stern talking-to.
Endless Ringing
The events took place at an apartment building in the city of Schwabach, in the southern German state of Bavaria. Primarily inhabited by working families, most of the residents had gone to bed early to get up for their jobs in the morning.
Then the doorbells started ringing.
After midnight, the doorbell of Lisa, 30, buzzed. She’s not a night owl, so the noise woke her up.
“We’d gone to bed … but we don’t tend to answer the door after 10 p.m., so when the bell rang, I tried to ignore it,” Lisa said according to The Guardian.
However, the ringing wouldn’t stop. Lisa went to check the doorbell camera, but to her surprise, there was no one at the door.
“Then my sister-in-law, who lives upstairs called, and asked whether our bell was ringing, as hers wouldn’t stop. It kept ringing even as we telephoned and, despite the fact, no one could be seen at the door,” recalled Lisa.
It wasn’t just them, either. Other residents started waking up as well, as their doorbells kept going off.
A Slimy Pest
As the problem continued into the night, with no culprit in sight, the residents decided enough is enough.
“We became really uneasy. That’s when we decided to call the police,” said Lisa.
Indeed, the building’s residents suspected that they’d fallen victim to klingelstreich — or ding dong ditch. They believed the no-good teens that often hanged out at an abandoned house across the road had figured out a way to set the doorbells off without being noticed.
So, two police officers arrived at the apartment building. However, the mystery only deepened.
The doorbells kept ringing even as the police talked to the residents and kept a keen eye on the doorbell cameras. Even the building’s motion-activated outdoor lights failed to go off, as if no one was out there.
Some of the residents probably were about to start believing in ghosts when it all suddenly became clear. The police officers and residents who had gone out to check the doorbells noticed that something had smeared a trail of slime across the doorbell touch plates.
Following the snail trail quickly revealed the culprit. Actually, we should probably say slug trail, as the nighttime troublemaker was revealed to be a regular slug.
The slimy hooligan had been crawling up and down the doorbell casing. Apparently, the thing had enough body weight and warmth to activate the touch-sensitive doorbells over and over again.
With that, the cops promptly took the slug into custody. According to a statement by the police, the culprit had been “brought down to size, taught its territory boundaries, and placed on a nearby stretch of grass.”
Talk about getting away with a slap on the wrist.
Caught on Camera
Strangely enough, this isn’t the first time slimy intruders have ding dong ditched people over in Europe. A similar incident played out in 2021 in the U.K.
Liane Jennings of Brentwood, Essex, had already gone to bed, when her smart doorbell pinged a notification to her phone. The device’s motion sensor had detected “unusual activity” in her front yard.
Concerned, Jennings went to check what was going on, but saw no one in the yard. Then the doorbell rang, but again, there was nobody there.
After the doorbell rang once more, Jennings started keeping an eye on the doorbell camera. Soon enough, the night crawler came into view.
A stray slug had managed to climb up to the doorbell. Jennings said her worried quickly turned into laughter as the gastropod slowly slid across the camera lens.