Tenants in an apartment building in Schwandorf, Bavaria, Southern Germany, suffered dreadful doorbell rings that made their lives a nightmare into the early hours. What they didn’t expect was the bizarre cause of the commotion. The culprit turned out to be a very ordinary, herbivorous slug, or “nacktschnecke,” as they say in German. It climbed on the metal fire bell plate and wreaked havoc for everyone in that building.
It looks like the slug began its mischief well after 10 p.m. At first it was dancing up and down the bell plate, causing the doorbell to ring incessantly. This loud and unexpected noise made many residents sit up to see what was going on, causing panic and agitation. According to Lisa, a resident of the apartment block, she initially dismissed the doorbell rings as a prank from local youths.
We had already turned in for the night. We normally don’t answer the door after 10 p.m., so when the doorbell rang, I quickly tried to dismiss it. I was hoping it was just those kids from the empty house across the road,” Lisa remembered. But as the annoying noise lingered on, her discomfort deepened.
Two weeks later, my sister-in-law who lives upstairs called and asked if our bell was ringing, since hers wouldn’t stop. The principal continued to ring even when we called out on the phone and even though no one appeared when we knocked on the door. We became really uneasy. That’s the moment we chose to involve the police,” she explained.
The slug’s arrival only became public knowledge when it was discovered when two officers showed up to investigate after residents called 911 to complain about the weird scene. After twelve seconds or so of torturous bell ringing, they realized that their motion detectors simply weren’t triggering with all this noise. During one inspection of the bell plate, they noticed a clear slime trail. The trail highlighted the slug’s path over the sensors.
“You could even see the slime trail it had made as it crawled over the sensors,” Lisa noted, highlighting the oddity of the event.
The strange scene unfolded inside the apartment building, shocking residents awake early Sunday morning just after midnight. In response, pure chaos settled in as desperate calls flooded to police dispatch begging for assistance. The slug’s behavior was different than the usual “klingelstreich” pranks, typically carried out by local teens. Rather, this nocturnal invader was able to make a racket without setting off the motion sensor.
After federal agents arrested the suspect, federal and local officials moved quickly. The police spokesperson in Schwabach commented on the resolution of the situation: “The slug has been brought down to size, taught about its territory boundaries and placed on a nearby stretch of grass.”