In a startling discovery, an Arkansas family found an unfamiliar individual secretly residing in their basement, leading to a bewildering mystery. This unsettling revelation came after family members noticed peculiar changes in their home, such as rearranged furniture and missing items.
It was Dutch Hoggatt, a professor at Harding University, who first grew suspicious. One morning, he realized his shoes, which he routinely left by the back door of their Searcy residence, had inexplicably disappeared.
“I questioned my wife about possibly discarding them, but she hadn’t,” Hoggart shared with KHTV. “Over time, we began to observe chairs shifted from their usual spots and some of our food mysteriously vanishing.”
Concerned by these odd occurrences, Hoggart’s daughter, Cherisse Gregory, alongside her husband, Mark, and Hoggart’s wife, Sharon, decided to conduct a thorough search of the house on Wednesday, April 29. They armed themselves with a baseball bat and gun for protection.
The search led Sharon to a storage area beneath the basement stairs, where she encountered an unexpected fright.
“As she ventured deeper into the closet, I noticed her eyes widen dramatically,” Mark recalled. “She began to retreat, exclaiming, ‘There’s someone in there. I can see their leg or their jeans or something.'” The family’s unsettling experience underscores the unpredictable nature of home security breaches.
Mark, with a bat in hand, demanded that the man come out.
“I start hitting the door, or the frame, kind of just to scare him a little bit. And he finally says, ‘Okay, I’m coming, I’m coming,’” Mark said.
The family called the police, and the man, identified as 41-year-old Preston Landis, was promptly arrested.
He had been living in Hoggatt’s home for days, according to police.
He spent Monday night, April 27, in the family’s crawl space before moving into the unlocked basement the next day while the couple was out of the house.
He fixed himself a makeshift bed deep inside a storage closet down there.
The family, however, said there are no hard feelings and preached empathy.
“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.”
Mark added, “There were 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.”
Landis is charged with residential burglary and theft of property. He is being held on a $15,000 bond.
