After noticing rearranged chairs and missing food, the family made quite a discovery.
SEARCY, Ark — An Arkansas family had a bizarre experience this week after they encountered an uninvited houseguest in their basement.
Harding University Professor Dutch Hoggatt had noticed strange things happening at his home all week long.
“I came in looking for my work shoes. I always leave them by the back door. My work shoes were gone,” Hoggatt said. “I asked my wife if she had thrown them away, and she had not. Over time, we noticed that chairs had been moved around in the house. We noticed that some of our food was missing.”
Hoggatt and his wife, Sharon, then told their daughter.
“I think they thought they were both going crazy,” said Cherisse Gregory, their daughter. “And I’m like, ‘That doesn’t happen at the same time suddenly.’”
On the evening of Wednesday, April 29, Dutch was at church, but Cherisse and her husband Mark were alarmed after they had heard about what was going on.
Cherisse, Mark and Sharon decided to start a search.
“We stopped by our house. I grabbed my bat and a gun just in case,” Mark Gregory said. “We didn’t know what to expect.”
They returned to the Hoggatt’s house, where Sharon was the first to enter a storage area underneath the basement stairs.
“She went further into the closet, and that’s when I saw her eyes get really big,” Mark said. “She starts to back out, and she says, ‘There’s someone in there. I see their leg, or their jeans, or something.’”
That “something” was an intruder who didn’t say anything at first.
“When I get in the closet, I yell at the guy to come out,” Mark said. “And I have a baseball bat in one hand. I start hitting the door, or the frame, kind of just to scare him a little bit. And he finally says, ‘OK, I’m coming, I’m coming.”
The man left the house without incident, although he had scars all over that he said were from barbed wire.
Cherisse called law enforcement as soon as Sharon spotted the man, and he was promptly arrested.
“I could tell he wasn’t really a threat,” Mark said, “But I had him step outside, and then I sat him down, and I just talked to him for a little while, till the police came.”
The man’s story was a wild one. He said he had spent Monday night in the family’s crawl space.
He entered the basement sometime Tuesday morning, as the door was unlocked between the time Hoggatt and his wife left the house.
He stayed there through Wednesday evening and even formed a makeshift bed underneath the stairs deep inside the storage closet.
Now, the family’s message is one of empathy, not anger.
“We’re not angry at this man,” Hoggatt said. “I feel sorry for the man. I’m glad we figured out there was somebody living in the house because this could have gone on for much longer than it did.”
“I don’t think he was trying to be a bad guy,” Mark added. “There was plenty of opportunities where he could have taken things. It seemed like he was just trying to get out of the elements, trying to survive.”
The man, identified as 41-year-old Preston Landis, did take items such as food and clothes, but the family made sure to clarify that he didn’t take anything valuable and didn’t hurt anyone.
Landis was taken into custody by the White County Sheriff’s Office and was charged with residential burglary and theft of property.
His bond has been set at $15,000.
