An elderly California woman who thought the noises coming from beneath her home were made by animals was shocked to find a naked man leaving under her house.

A 93-year-old woman from Los Angeles’ El Sereno neighborhood recently got the shock of her life after realizing that the bizarre noises she had begun to hear from beneath her home over the last few weeks were not made by animals but by a man who had settled there. The woman and her family usually heard strange noises under the house during the night, so they assumed they were made by dogs or wild animals passing through the crawlspace, but last Thursday the noises became particularly louder and seemed to be made in response to them walking through the place. They began to suspect that something wasn’t right, so they called the police, who found a naked man who appeared to have been living under the house for quite some time.

Photo: Gustavo Zambelli/Unsplash

“It was usually late at night, and we just chucked it off to animals being under the house,” Ricardo Silva, son-in-law of the elderly homeowner, told NBC Los Angeles. “The noises were kind of like knocking. It was kind of like, as my wife was walking, they were kind of knocking back from under the house so she says, you know something’s wrong.”

Getting the unwanted guest out from under the house was quite the task, as he didn’t want to come out. Police spent hours trying to talk him into crawling out, and then they tried to intimidate him with police dogs, but he didn’t seem worried at all. In the end, they had to force him out with tear gas.

 

“He refused to leave. He wasn’t scared of the dogs, and the first two attempts at gas didn’t fish him out,” Silva said. “It’s a bizarre thing, but it’s not probably uncommon, you know, in this day and age, people are looking for shelter.”

The naked man was identified as 27-year-old Issac Betancourt, and he is suspected to have lived under the El Sereno house for the last six months. The family is now planning to block access to the 2-foot-high crawlspace under the entire house to prevent similar problems in the future.