Inside

A few months after my husband and I bought our house, we adopted a pitbull mix. She has some anxiety and fear around new people and with dogs, but we didn't know all of this when we adopted her (I promise this is relevant to the story!)

The way our house/yard is set up is that we have a galley kitchen leading into a sunroom with a back door going out onto a small deck. The deck has stairs down into our fenced in yard (it's a 6 foot tall wood fence so we can't really see through it). We live on a corner lot so our backyard is behind the house and along the side, and on the other side of the fence the sidewalk goes right along it and there is a driveway that connects to the sidewalk behind our backyard fence. The driveway is shared with our next door neighbor and the neighbor behind us (but nobody lives there it is basically abandoned while he renovated it).

One night a few weeks after we got our dog we were out in the yard playing fetch with her around 9 pm (summer but it was already dark out). We hear someone walking down the sidewalk and she barks because she has stranger danger about people walking (and is fairly protective of us already after just a few weeks). As she's barking we see a set of keys fly over the fence into our yard. My husband yelled out "hey you dropped your keys!" and gets no response, we just hear the footsteps continue walking. We chat for a second and decide we will head inside because our dog is spooked and we will just post about the keys on our neighborhood site so someone can claim them or return them to the owner.

Once inside I need to use the bathroom, and I prefer our upstairs bathroom so I head upstairs while my husband heads through the kitchen to the living room to get back to his video games. As he's leaving the kitchen he hears the backdoor open and shut and then realizes I'm upstairs so it can't be me. Our dog remained in the sunroom during all of this.

He turns around and sees someone peeking out from behind the cabinets - there is about a 3 foot wall blocking the door from view at the other end of the kitchen that this man is hiding behind. He yells at the guy "I see you!" and walks further into the kitchen, and sees my dog is growling at the intruder and has him backed up against the door. The guy is pressed against the door trying to stay away from my dog, and my husband is yelling at the guy to get out of our house. The guy is not responding, so my husband asks him if the keys are his. The guy nods and my husband says "get out and you can have them."

The guy finally goes out the door and my husband peeks through the glass on the door and this guy is just sitting on our deck. He goes out there to try to have a conversation with the guy and asks him what he was doing and why he came in the house (he's pretty convinced the guy is on something since he seems out of it and isn't responding). The guy kept saying that he thought it was his friend Dave's house and that he's lost and "doesn't look like people around here" so he was nervous. He told my husband that when our dog barked he got scared and threw the keys and then followed us into our backyard and into the house.

My husband (bless him but he's a bit trusting) offered to help the guy find Dave's house (we didn't know all the neighbors since we were new-ish too) and the guy wasn't even able to tell him the address or a phone number for this Dave person. My husband gives him the keys and watches him leave the yard and comes back inside, where blissfully unaware me just came back downstairs. He's explaining the situation to me and as he's retelling me feels a bit uneasy about it and decides to go back outside to see if he can find the guy (probably not his best idea but he didn't think the guy was intending to harm us).

He finds the guy wandering the street out in front of our house and tries asking him more questions. The guy only has the keys and some prescription bottles and continues rambling about his friend Dave and is unable to tell my husband where his car is or where Dave lives. My husband asked him if our dog hurt him and he said she did bite him but there were no marks on his hand or anything, so it seemed like it was more of a warning shot to back off.

He eventually realizes he's not going to get anything more out of this guy and comes back inside where we decide to call the police - not really because we are worried about him coming back but because he did not seem ok and we live in a state where people 100% often have guns in their homes, so if he had wandered in another house things could have played out very differently.

We talked to the cops but never found out if they found him or what happened...but we always lock the back door when we come inside now! Reading other stories on here it could've played out very differently and much worse, but having a drug-addled person throw their keys into your yard and then follow you in is a bit jarring regardless of their intention. We felt very lucky to have had our dog at that moment!