Oh my gosh. Totally get it. I also live alone, and when I hear an out of place sound of any kind, it definitely gets the blood flowing. Although the thought of an intruder shushing the dogs is pretty hysterical, in hindsight of course!
Ha Ha, I know. That's exactly what I thought after the fact...I was like "Why in the hell would a burglar be "shushing" the dogs when they barked?"...You have to hear it, he sounds just like a person doing it. Actually, I think I'll try to catch him doing it and post the video here, so you guys can hear what I heard, then imagine just walking into your house, putting your keys and your bag down on the counter, hearing your dogs barking, and then hearing someone go "Shhhh!" and then having the dogs stop barking...It was very surreal. But yeah, also very stupid on my part, lol...And yes, I think it's hysterical...NOW.
Back when I was in college doing my BS, I think my Junior year, I was still living at home with my mom and commuting to college. I had to park my car on the street in front of the house because we only had a one-car garage and one-car-wide driveway, and my mom couldn't drive a stick-shift to move my car out of the way, so I couldn't park in the driveway...I grew up with just me and my mom in that house, that was it, 2 women alone, so yeah, it could be frightening at times...Well one night I was home alone studying, my mom was out, around 9:00 at night, and I heard definite male voices out front of the house. We lived in a very quiet, old development where my high-school is located, but very little traffic at all, only local, as I lived on a dead-end street that ended at the woods (my backyard was literally connected to the fields surrounding the parking lot of the huge Catholic Church in my hometown, we literally shared our yards, so you'd think it would be a safe area, quiet neighborhood with old houses built in the 20's-40's for the most part, all surrounding the high-school and it's athletic fields, very ideal place to grow-up...the house i grew-up in was built in 1944, and actually had locks in both doors that used skeleton keys...high security lol)...So I walked downstairs, looked out the front window, and there were 3 guys breaking into my car. I was more pissed-off than scared, because I had left my cell phone in my car (this was 2000-2001, so cell phones were still not a big deal, just a little flip phone), along with a 12-disc CD-changer, Pioneer Stereo system, and a cd-book filled with a couple hundred cd's...Music is my life, always has been, so I got enraged...and stupid...Instead of grabbing the phone and calling 911, I just automatically opened up the front door, about 10 yards away from the car and the 3 men. They had pried my driver's door open on my 1997 Nissan Altima SE that I had just purchased, my first "real" car, had already found the CD Changer under the passenger seat and ripped it out, tearing the cables, taken my CD book with 200-300 CDs in it, and were trying to get my Pioneer head-unit out of the dash when I opened the door...They didn't count on it being bolted into the dash, I guess they just thought they could pull it right out...Not quite. So they were literally sitting on the road, surrounded by houses all around, to both sides of my house and then across the street on both sides, just sitting there ripping my car apart...
I yelled "Hey, what the **** are you doing?", and they just looked at me and literally laughed, and the guy sitting in the driver's seat kept prying my dashboard apart with a pry bar, while the other two walked right up to me. I was holding the cordless phone, so I started to dial 911 when I realized that I recognized 2 of the guys, they were friends of an ex-boyfriend of mine that i had just broken-up with after 3 years. 911 answered, and I said "Yeah, there are 3 guys breaking into my car right now, I'm outside with them, and two of them I know, their names are *** and ***, the third guy I don't know, my address is ****, etc". As soon as they realized that I could see them and said their names to the dispatcher, one of them grabbed the guy that was inside of my car and pulled him out, yelling "Let's go, she called the cops", but the other guy, who I knew, not well, but he was 3 years behind me in school and my mom taught him for 6 years, well he came right up to me and clubbed me with what I think was a tire iron/lug wrench, but i never did figure out what it was exactly. When he did that i bent over and grabbed the side of my head, and he lifted whatever it was up again to bash my head again (I'm convinced to this day he was going to kill me, he would have had he hit me again with it over the back of my head), but I just instinctively I guess, I didn't realize I did it until after I had already done it, i kneed him as hard as I could right in the crotch, and he fell over and landed on the sidewalk that led from my front door through my front yard to the main sidewalk. He just laid there whining and making groaning noises, and I then stomped on his hand that was holding the tire iron or whatever it was as hard as I could, he let go of it and I grabbed it. The other two guys had already run down the street, jumped into their car, and were gone, and left him laying there in my front yard...I had dropped the tire iron, I didn't even realize I wasn't holding it anymore, then I sat down on my front stoop and that's when I realized that my head was gushing blood and cracked open...
The cops showed up about 20 minutes later (my hometown didn't have and still doesn't have any local police department to this day, nor a hospital, so the state police had to come from about 10-15 minutes outside of town), and we were both still in the front yard, him on the sidewalk and me on the stoop of my house...They cuffed us both, idiots, they cuffed us both...I don't remember anything else really except that they wanted to see my ID, which was actually inside of my car, in my wallet, which they had stolen, the entire wallet, so I had no ID (they got like $2 in my wallet and a credit card that was maxed-out from school books, lol, that's what they got from taking my wallet)..Luckily my neighbor from across the street came over and identified me, and then he realized that HIS CAR had also been pried open, and he lost his entire stereo, gearshift knob, a book of CD's as well, and some other personal stuff like his watch, an expensive Mont Blanc pen, and the title to the car, though they didn't take the car, lol....
They arrested that guy, who turned on his two buddies who left him there, and he identified both of them, including the other one that I knew who I also identified as the same person that he did. The third guy was also a friend of my ex-boyfriend, but i didn't know him. They had hit every single car on the street that I lived on that was parked on the street out front of the houses. I broke the guy's hand/fingers, but I had a concussion and had to have 10 staples put in my head. I had some bleeding in my left ear, but I was lucky, I still to this day know that he was going to kill me so I couldn't ID him, even though I had already told the 911 dispatcher...The real kicker to this story as these 3 guys, along with my ex-boyfriend, had been running a theft-ring out of a small, local auto repair garage in town that was owned by a friend of mine's dad. They had been doing this every single night, all over town and the outskirts for months, and then ended-up dumping an entire dumpster's worth of car electronics, cell phones, CD's, etc. in a dumpster behind a local grocery store right after this happened with me, because I had identified 2 of them...So like 15 people ended up being arrested and going to state-prison for armed robbery among other charges, the guy that hit me with the tire iron got a bunch of assault charges too, the garage was shut-down and my friend's dad also went to prison for running the theft ring out of his garage, he was getting a cut...It was a huge deal here...
So yeah, living alone can be scary, and I still get a bit jumpy....But moral to this story is "Don't be a hero, a stupid hero, no possessions are worth dying for."
