Arkansas couple discovers homeless man secretly living in their basement

The stuff of nightmares: Dutch and Sharon Hoggatt recently discovered that a 41-year-old stranger had been secretly living in their house for days.

Dutch, a professor at Harding University, and his wife started noticing some signs that a Goldilocks was among them.

Something was a bit off: Shoes mysteriously vanishing, chairs rearranged, and food going missing. Thankfully, their daughter Cherisse and her husband Mark didn't think they were both going senile at the same time.

The family did what any sensible Arkansan would do. They grabbed a baseball bat and gun and started searching the house.

Lo and behold, tucked away in a storage closet under the basement stairs like a raccoon in a crawl space was 41-year-old Preston Scott Landis. He had fashioned himself a little makeshift bed and everything.

From the local CBS affiliate:

'[Sharon] went further into the closet, and that's when I saw her eyes get really big,' Mark remembered. '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, "Okay, 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.

The family had already called law enforcement, who arrested Landis.

Landis has been charged with residential burglary and theft of property, and his bond is set at $15,000.