My sister lives outside London. The town that she lives in is changing, not the kind of place that you want to run around in after dark. Wednesday night she was home alone, her son at a friends for a sleepover and her boyfriend working his usual overnight shift keeping the tubes running smoothly in London. They live in a typical for the area attached house with brick walls surrounding the garden out back and the only entry is from a secured gate at the side of the house. It's secured because they have a large boxer dog named Oz whom they treasure. The gate is NEVER left open and requires a human to unlatch it.
Just as she was going to bed about 12:30am a dog appeared at her back patio doors, barking and carrying on wanting to come in. She was startled first by the dog appearing and secondly because OZ was carrying on back at him. She wasn't sure what to do other than find a way to quiet the dogs before her neighbors all woke and blamed her for the disturbance. Her first thought was the Emergency Vets office, they recommended that she try to bring him in from the rain. OK why she would call them and not the police is something that she and I haven't figured out yet. Just goes to show that we really don't think rationally sometimes. She was afraid to open the door not knowing how OZ would carry on and she knew she wouldn't be able to break up a couple of dogs going at it in the garden.
So she did what any good computer age person would do....she took pictures. Now whether she took pictures to show the neighbors that it wasn't OZ causing the disturbance or whether it was just to validate the crazy story I don't know but these pics are a bit chilling. Let me continue.....
A half hour-45 minutes go by there's a knock at the door. She looks out and sees a tall man and he says through the window that his dog is in her garden. In her head shes thinking 'how does he know its in my garden?' The gardens are all so close together there it would be hard to tell. She looks over at her neighbors houses, all dark, no sign of him knocking at anyone elses door. He insists 'can u open your gate so I can get my dog?'. There's no way that shes going out there and tells him to 'open it yourself!' and 'get your bloody dog!'.
With that he starts down the side of her house to the back and rounds up the dog which she said seemed to take a long time. Now mind you, he has to pass her kitchen windows and kitchen door, looking at everything along the way. He finally walks back out and down the street.
Bernie can't sleep now because shes nervous and decides to look at the pictures that she took. She is totally startled by what she sees and shoots off an email to me with these first two pics attached.
The next morning I called her and she mentioned that there were other pictures that she wanted to show me. These pics clearly show that the dog is looking at someone/something. There's absolutely nothing in her garden that could have held this dogs attention and made it stop barking other than a person, his person.
he's looking back and to the path here-quiet
now he's looking directly to the side of the patio doors. If Bernie were to have opened the door for this dog what would have happened????
Later in the day once everyone was home she walked out into the garden and came across a large heavy piece of wood. She asked her boys if they had seen it before and they hadn't. Obviously this man was waiting for her to open the patio door and...oh I can't bear to think about it. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.
Moral of the story, this may be a new ploy using dogs now to lure you out of your house. Sure this happened in England and thats a long way away but it can happen anywhere. Just be careful.
