An elderly woman in California who thought strange sounds beneath her home was from animals was stunned to discover a naked man living under her house.
A 93-year-old resident of Los Angeles’ El Sereno neighborhood recently found out that the peculiar noises she had been hearing for weeks weren’t caused by animals but by a man who had taken up residence beneath her home.
Initially, the woman and her family dismissed the nighttime sounds as typical disturbances from stray dogs or wildlife. However, last Thursday, the noises grew louder and appeared to respond to their movements, prompting them to contact the authorities.
To their astonishment, police uncovered a naked man who seemed to have been living in the crawlspace for an extended period.
“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.
